The Postmistress of Paris(10)

“Moppelchen,” he said, trying to calm himself so he wouldn’t alarm her. She had been nowhere near the steep fall to the rocks and the sea. “Moppelchen,” he repeated, Elza’s nickname for her chubby baby, her little fatso. He pulled her close, buried his chin in her soft hair, and whispered, “What are you doing out here by yourself?”

“I heard them singing. Did you hear them?”

“Singing,” he repeated, wondering if he could find another house, one farther away from the Mediterranean. “Yes, that’s the sound of the birds and the sea. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“The birds and the sea, and the angels too.”

He held her head back a little, to better see her brow that was her mother’s, her tiny nose, her cherry lips. “Singing angels?” he said, trying to tease her out of another conversation about where Elza had gone. “Moppelchen, are you sleepwalking?”

“Listen. They’re all singing with Mutti.”

She began to sing then, the song Elza used to sing to her each night. He pulled her close, repeating “Moppelchen, Moppelchen,” the thoughts crashing in with the crash of the sea and the red-gold of the evening sky, the soft, steely blue of the water in the late-day light, and the sweet pungent smell of Luki’s hair pressed to his face. He tightened his arm around her and sang gently with her, “Wie ist die Welt so stille Und in der D?mmrung Hülle So traulich und so hold.” How the world stands still in twilight’s veil, so sweet and snug.

Yes, they would stay here, where perhaps the world would stand still. He would put a fence around the house. He would arrange it in the morning, and they would be safe here, listening to Elza and the angels singing with the birds and the sea as they sat together on this dreaming log.





Twenty Months Later: Tuesday, September 5, 1939

GARE DU NORD, PARIS

It was time. Germany had invaded Poland, provoking France and Britain to declare war. The miracle Nanée and everyone in France had thought would save them hadn’t come. Instead, the “appel immédiate” posters calling Frenchmen to enlist—posters that had been taken down after the Munich crisis a year earlier—were up again. This time the call was real.

Nanée looked on as Danny knelt awkwardly in his new soldier’s uniform, the bustle of his regiment already boarding as he pressed his lips to his two-year-old son’s blond curls. Peterkin tipped his head back and looked up from under long lashes, an expression already identifiable as the boy’s disgruntled stare. He dropped his new floppy-eared bunny to the dirty platform and pulled two toy pistols from a holster.

“I have two guns, Papa,” he said. “One for me and one for Bunnykins.”

Nanée took T’s hand, drawing a glance from Danny. “You’re more family than my own family,” he’d told her when he asked her to come with them to the station. “T will need you to hold her hand after I leave.”

“I wish you could come with me, champ,” he said now. “You’d sure be a better French interpreter than I, but let’s not tell the British Army.”

It gave T some comfort, and Nanée too: that the only weapon Danny was to wield in this war was his ability with languages.

“You’re such a brave boy,” Danny said to his son.

What a brave girl you are, Nanée’s father had once said to her. She had been seven then, old enough to remember, which Peterkin was not.

Danny wrapped Peterkin and T in his arms one last time, his chin grazing T’s boy-cut hair.

“Nanée,” he said, “I’m trusting you to return these two to me in just as good a shape as I’m leaving them.”

T, wiping a tear, tried to muster the same note of humor and hope. “But who will take care of Nanée while she’s taking care of us?”

“Nanée can take care of herself and then some,” he said, and he grabbed his kit bag, and kissed T and Peterkin one last time.

Nanée watched him board the train and peer back out at them through the dirty window. As the train disappeared into its own steam, its clack clack clack fading into the chatter of the station, she stooped to pick up Bunnykins, then wrapped her arms around T and Peterkin both, like Danny had.

“You ought to leave too, Nanée,” T whispered, a heartbreaking ache in her voice. “You ought to go home.”

Nanée leaned back and looked into her friend’s face. “Pffft,” she said. “Just because Ambassador Bullitt commands me to?” Then, more gently, “I’m not leaving you, T.”

“If I had a home in America to return to, I would go.”

Nanée pulled the stuffed bunny’s ears and snuggled him against Peterkin’s little face, all the while trying to imagine living back in Evanston, or even at Marigold Lodge.

“If I had a home in America, T,” she said, “so might I.”





Saturday, October 14, 1939





SANARY-SUR-MER


You are Edouard Moss?”

Edouard, watching from the whistle-stop station platform as his friend Berthe settled her daughter and Luki in the train carriage, turned to see two policemen.

“You will come with us.”

“With you? No, my papers are in order.” He pulled them from his jacket pocket. “I’m sorry, the train is just leaving. Give me a moment to see Luki go.”